SPIN ZERO

Henry Corbin wrote that cognitive imagination functions directly as an organ of knowledge, “just as real as – if not more real than – the sense organs. By developing this faculty we can overcome the divorce between thinking and being.”

In "Spin Zero", Novella Gallery presents three artists – Brian Wood, Max Razdow, and John Newman – whose works function as sites of imagining. These works look intensely out and intensely in until the fixed position of self is dissolved in object and illusion – each work is a node where material, psyche, and vision tussle. What remains is transparent and motile – object, image, and metaphor reach longingly toward meaning but don’t reify into simile or discursive reason. Wood’s paintings, Razdow’s drawings, and Newman’s sculptures are extremely personal, even idiosyncratic, but each work reaches beyond itself into what is unknown to itself and therefore strange.

—Brian Wood, Max Razdow, John Newman

Brian Wood lives and works in New York. His work has been reviewed and included in the New York Times, Bomb Magazine, Blind Spot, and publications from MoMA. Permanent museum collections include the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. His awards include the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant. Recent solo exhibitions include Jeannie Freilich Contemporary in New York, group exhibitions at Gandy Gallery in Prague, Schema Projects in Brooklyn, and “The Printed Picture” at MoMA. Holland Cotter reviewed his recent solo show “Enceinte” at the Church of St Paul, NYC, for the New York Times in March, 2014.

Max Razdow lives and works in New York. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art F City, and L Magazine. His recent two-person show with JJ Manford at Freight + Volume Gallery was reviewed by Katy Diamond Hammer for Eyes Towards the Dove in August, 2014. His solo shows include Future Myths of the Surface at Galerie Jan Dhaese in Belgium. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles, Max Edlin Gallery in NYC, Gallery Lara in Tokyo, and he has a solo show upcoming at Galerie Jan Dhaese in Belgium.

John Newman lives and works in New York. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Brooklyn Rail, New York Magazine, and Art in America. His awards include the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, the Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. Permanent museum collections include the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Berlin, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Recent exhibitions include “Everything is on the Table,” a solo show at Dartmouth College, NH, a group show at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, NYC, and “Fit,” a solo show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York.